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Saturday, May 08, 2004

Rain around the Rally

 

It started raining right around 4 o'clock yesterday, rally time for those opposed to Mayor Street's $4 million budget cuts targetted at Philadelphia arts organizations.

When I got to LOVE Park, site of the rally, at 4:25 the rain had stopped and there was a modest crowd (200 people maybe) listening to Arts Sanctuary students reading their poetry.

Art Sanctuary is the North Philadelphia arts organization started by writer Lorene Carey. ( image is the LOVE statue symbolically draped in black. Note the rain-slick plaza)



The Philadelphia Cultural Alliance crew, which had organized the rally -- and indeed the entire grass roots "stop the cuts" campaign -- was mopping up tables, drying out some wet postcards and bumper stickers and carrying on. I loved the bumper sticker. (image above)

The Cultural Alliance is one professional group. They even had a media table with press kits. And their staffers walked among the crowd handing out blue postcards which people filled out on the spot and handed back to them to be sent to the Mayor.


The walkway outside the Philadelphia Tourism building at 16th and JFK Blvd., which makes a perfect dais for speakers, was full of folks waiting for their turn. Anne d'Harnoncourt, Director of the Philadelphia Museum was there. Her institution may lose $2.25 million if the mayor's cuts get approved.

University of the Arts President Miguel Angel Corzo, who gave a wonderful speech saying everything you might want an arts advocate to say (like you think it's only sports that brings people to Philadelphia? How about the orchestra, the museums, Old City galleries, the dance troupes and the art schools!) (image shows D'Harnancourt shaking hands with an Art Sanctuary student who had just read a poem. The man in the white baseball hat is Corzo.)


Homemade signs abounded, many of them handed out by Cultural Alliance folks to people who said they'd hold one. Artists Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck brought their own signs, which had a nice, Venturi-Scott Brown no nonsense quality. (image of Feasley, Swenbeck and a friend)


Several puppets loomed above the crowd. I thought this orange and blue one was a beauty. (image below) Brian Wallace, Curator at the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design told me he thought the puppet was made by Moore student Michelle Posado.


Lots of students showed up. Moore College had a contingent carrying school banners. In addition, artists, administrators, educators and curators were all over the place, including many from the Art museum.

I saw familiar faces, like Ashley Peel and Jacqueline van Rhyn from the Print Center, Thora Jacobson and Warren Angle of Fleisher Art Memorial.

Artists Jennie Shanker, Candy Depew, Janet Samuel, Nancy Lewis, Kate Abercrombie, Kent Latimer, Olivia Schreiner, Sarah McEneaney, Randy Dalton, Leslie Kaufman and Doris Nogiera Rogers were there.



Nick Stuccio of the Fringe Festival was there. Matthew "Mattyboy" Hart of Spiral Q Puppet Theater was there. (pictured are McEneaney and Hart holding a banner)

PMA Photography Curator Kate Ware was there, as were PMA staffers Bay Hallowell, Janet Cooke and Rebecca Hoenig of the Education Department. (pictured below are Hallowell and Cooke with a rally supporter)


Molly Dougherty, Director of Galleries at Moore and Sean Stoops of Asian Arts Initiative were in attendance.


Councilman Michael Nutter came in near the end with a great short speech that began: "I work in a little building across the street (meaning City Hall)...and I never saw a rally I didn't want to be in." Then segued quickly into: "I have no artistic ability but that doesn't mean I don't care about art." And ended with the fact that his daughter wore the "art" pants in the family. According to today's newspaper, "a final budget is due by the end of the month," which means you still have some time to send in a postcard or pick up the phone if you haven't done so.


Five break dancers from Olive Dance company (pictured is one Olive dancer) took turns spinning and hopping on their hands, each one with his own style and twists. What a gang. They were so happy with the crowd's response they did a couple of encores. More about Olive here including a quick time movie of them performing at the Kennedy Center.



Kulu Mele dancers in blue (left) danced an African dance barefoot on the wet pavement, using drums to create a mesmerizing beat. This group, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania Folklore Project is amazing. (read about them here at the project's website which also has a quick time movie of them performing)

Art Sanctuary with younger dancers dressed in gold were accompanied by a shamen figure (image right) who mingled among them. Their moves echoed some of the previous troupe's dance steps. They also were very good.

The event ended when staffers lifted the shroud from the LOVE statue and everybody cheered. Someone from the platform started the chant "Don't cut culture" and that seemed a bit weak but people barked it out with vigor so what do I know.

My First Friday trek began after that as Bay and I hit the trail to Vox Populi, Gallery Joe and the new outlier in Northern Liberties Media Bureau Networks. More on that tomorrow.

permanent link  roberta 3:10 PM
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Friday, May 07, 2004

Best blog graphic of the morning award

 

Reading my daily blogs I braked for the Rummy-o-meter at Daily Gusto a graphic cooked by the blog proprietor that found a little humor in today's big news event.

Score one for Daily Gusto!
permanent link  roberta 10:04 AM
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Behind the news, more on PEI

 

I was working on a story for PW about the recent announcement of PEI grant money and talked with a couple of the grant recipients about their upcoming projects. Here's a look at PAFA's PEI project. For more on the 2004 grants read Libby's and my previous post

Ellen Harvey paints by video
PAFA won its first PEI award this year, for a project by Brooklyn artist Ellen Harvey. Harvey, who has been making a name for herself doing museum interventions (she was the one who did the "A Whitney for the Whitney" in which she painted every painting in the museum's collection -- small and on wood -- using the museum's catalog as a reference. She hung the work alphabetically (like it is in the catalog) at the Whitney's Altria space (the old Whitney Phillip Morris) and placed several of the museum's new acquisitions behind a partition wall accessible through peepholes. (top image is detail of the installation) See the artist's great user friendly website for more.


Harvey will be painting again for PAFA but this time it'll be mostly virtual painting that you'll see -- along with real paintings on mirrors and some wall drawings.

About the video, Curator Alex Baker, whose show this is, said the artist will create "two video installations of her arm drawing the interior architectural spaces of the Academy." Baker also said the video will "age the Academy" through use of faux finishes. I'm not sure what that means but the piece is clearly about the confluence of old and new, past and present. Baker said "[Harvey] said she wanted to turn it into a haunted house but it's more complicated that that." (images left and right are from Harvey's video "Seeing is Believing" 2001)

One video projection will be in the front of the museum and the other will be upstairs in the rear. The idea is to create "two axial views of the academy intersecting with each other," Baker said.

About the mirrors, Baker said she will create "a hall of mirrors in the rotunda from floor to ceiling, salon style." On the mirrors will be paintings -- in white.

About the wall drawings, Baker said Harvey would place trompe l'oeil drawings of Academy statues in the museum's inset niches for statuary. (It's not clear whether the statues will be in the niches or not). There was talk of drawings bursting into flames, too, although I was too confused by then to piece that together coherently, sorry.

By the way, Harvey used to be a high-powered lawyer. Yale law and Harvard, according to Baker. She always did art on the side and after law school quit her law practice to devote herself to art. She went to the Whitney's studio program and hit the trail like a comet, bursting out with the New York Beautification Project which we told you about.

Speaking of New York, Baker was eager to tell me of his new curatorial gig at DUMBO Art Center, a group show that opens May 22 and includes work by Philadelphia artists Max Lawrence and Virgil Marti.

All we can say is keep it coming, Alex! Two thumbs way up.


permanent link  roberta 8:23 AM
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Trippy Pollock tip

 
Post by Barbara Smolen
[Muralist and Drexel faculty Barbara Smolen wrote to give us some cyber air kisses and this tip about a show we're going to run right out and see]

I LOVE your artblog! Artbrain food is always good.

Have you seen Bruce Pollock's show at Fleisher Ollman? (image is "Red Dextral," 2003, oil on canvas on panel)

I think his stuff is mystical and mesmerizing, trippy, refreshing in a stubborn way. (See Pollock's website, designed by artblog contributor Anne Seidman, by the way, for more images)

He teaches at Drexel and he's really nice. He looks just like you'd expect him to from his paintings-- like a yoga instructor! I'm curious as to your opinion of his work.

--Your neighbor, Barbara Smolen
permanent link  roberta 6:44 AM
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Wednesday, May 05, 2004

The high end

 
There's a new cap on how much people will spend for photographs. Check out artnet.com's story on the raging photo auction prices in New York.
permanent link  libby 3:56 PM
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Stress-free Strauss

 


I stopped by Zoe Strauss' studio to pick up a print (the one I had selected Saturday--see post--had sold out) and found the artist, coffee in hand, trying to move on to next year's event.

She said "It's kind of like a little miracle in some ways," referring to how Saturday went. She earned back what she had spent during the past six months for the exhibit. "I made almost a thousand bucks." She feels like she broke even.

Surrounded by color copies of her photos glued to the walls, I kept losing my focus because my eyes were drawn to the photos.

If you want a photo, you can go to her website. There's a photo rotation on the right; just give it a minute to do its thing.
permanent link  libby 3:44 PM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004

Binge and purge

 

My PW review about "Creative Consumption" at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery is out now so I'll tell you a little more about the show here and give you lots more pictures.

"Consumption," which is very good, is all about appetite. The group show of emerging artists from the West Collection at SEI is replete with images about food, clothing, style, image and excess. (top image detail of Jonathan Callan's "Wonderland")



The implication throughout is that too much of any one thing will get you in trouble. Witness Jonathan Callan's "Wonderland" a group of eighteen stuffed animals trapped in the most ugh-y white goo.

The stuffed and encased innocents -- Furby, Daisy Duck, Eeyore and company -- sit there like perversions. It's lust gone bonkers. Whether the lust and excess appetite refers to sexual appetite, appetite for cake or for money, it's clear these stand-ins for children -- or maybe even adults -- are sick. (installation shot right shows Jonathan Seliger's "Grand Girdle(Endless Takeout)")



Wayne Thibaud's paintings of cakes and pies for all their scrumptuousness have always seemed less about appetite than about beauty and joie de vive.

In this show, Sharon Core's color photograph, "Pie Counter," an homage to the painter, is less sensual than ascetic. In a disturbing way, it evokes a world of joyless feasting -- bulemia, not gourmet excess. (image above)



Don't get me wrong. This is a great show and a lot of the work is fun.

Like Daphne Fitzpatrick's peanut-butter and banana treasure chest ("Chest" shown right) which, if you've ever had to make lunch for a two year old will flood you with memories of little sticky fingers and sandwiches dropped by accident in the sandbox at the playground.


But the overall ambiance here is of sadness and death by culture of excess. (image is Andrew Bush's Iris print "Man with Renoir")

Leigh Stevens' "Model for a Cure" a styrofoam and cake icing concoction under glass spoke to me of wedding banquets and the entire wedding enterprise -- which people spend lifetimes paying off. (image below)


Muniz's "Emerson" (bottom image) and Danica Phelps' "Brooklyn 1999" (below) take the discussion to different level.

Both artists use the trappings of excess in a more eliptical way, speaking of the changeable nature of appetite and the human cycle of party now, pay later. Phelps is a consumer of her own life, documenting -- like an accountant -- every jot of expense and every penny of cash flowing in.



And Muniz, a set-up photographer, is a consumer of the throw-away. He often uses litter, lint and ephemera in his works ("Emerson" makes use of confetti and cigarette butts found on the street). Muniz and Phelps are making points about living with and somehow getting on top of the culture.



Instead of beating the drum that excess is bad and moderation is good, these artists use the excess as it's found (on the street for Muniz; in her life for Phelps) and transform it, somehow insinuating one can ultimately take control and turn things around.

You know, of course, that the West Collection is put together by collector extraordinaire, the Art Addict, Paige West.
permanent link  roberta 11:26 PM
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Tuesday this and that

 

Stella and I were in New York last week with my friend Kitty who was visiting from Milwaukee. Kitty's a muralist, sidewalk chalk artist and a Caldecott-nominated children's book illustrator and she was speaking at the Donnell branch of the New York Public Library about her illustrations for "Cartwheel to the Moon," written by Emanuel di Pasquale. (image top)

We visited Ground Zero which Kitty hadn't seen in person and while walking around the site I spotted this black-draped building (image below) that stopped me dead in my tracks.


The wind was blowing such that the cloth rippled vertically creating a black river running up to the sky and stopping abruptly.

The building overlooks Ground Zero at the southern perimeter. I found its black ambiance shocking and comforting at the same time. Not quite a flag and not really a river it was a serendipitous memorial standing at attention and bearing witness.

permanent link  roberta 9:12 AM
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Monday, May 03, 2004

Stalking the wild grow room

 

I'm begining to feel like a paparazzi stalking poor Philly homie Virgil Marti for artblog, but really, all I was doing was watching Charles Osgood on Sunday morning when a feature on the Whitney Biennial popped up on my tv screen. The reporter's main point was that a lot of stuff in the show was incomprehensible, even if that stuff would be famous one day. But Virgil's Grow Room installation, swell visual and all, was something on her short list of stuff referring to her own era that she seemed to have enjoyed.

If you missed it, at least you read it here.


permanent link  libby 7:46 PM
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To Barnes neighbors -- let it go already

 

[Note: Today's Inquirer business section has a tiny, killer of a story by Patricia Horn that got my goat. Apparently the neighbors who were involved in the race discrimination lawsuit lodged by previous Barnes Director Richard Glanton are still trying to get the Barnes to pay their legal fees -- which used to be $300,000 in 1996 when the case was dismissed and now weigh in at $440,000 if I read the article correctly. At a time when yard signs all over Merion proclaim "The Barnes belongs in Merion" I have to ask why? If the Merion neighbors with the yard signs truly want the institution to stay in Merion they might try to exert some pressure on these particular Merion neighbors who seem to want to assist the Barnes into bankruptcy regardless of its location. Why whip an institution when it's down, I want to know. The township seems to have cut the Barnes a break. After eight years, the neighbors should do the same. Here's the article in its entirety (bolding is my emphasis). See what you think.]

Master for Barnes fees suit

An 8-year-old dispute over charges of racism between the Barnes Foundation and its Lower Merion neighbors could be headed toward a resolution, just as the Barnes is hoping to win court approval to move its famed art collection out of the neighborhood.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has appointed attorney Robert E. Welsh Jr. as a special master in the case. His job is to resolve who should pay about $440,000 in attorneys' fees and costs incurred by Barnes' neighbors after the foundation filed a civil-rights suit against Lower Merion Township, its commissioners and certain neighbors.

The decision to sue, made during the tenure of previous Barnes president Richard Glanton, proved to be a costly error by the Barnes: It was among the legal cases whose costs propelled the Barnes close to bankruptcy.

In September 2002, citing its financial condition, the Barnes asked Montgomery County Orphans' Court for permission to break its founder's will and move its art collection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The court may rule on that request this summer.

The Barnes' civil-rights case against Lower Merion and the neighbors was dismissed in June 1996. But the township and neighbors requested in November 1997 that the Barnes pay $1.8 million in attorneys' fees and costs.

The township settled with the Barnes for $100,000 in 1998, but the neighbors - whose costs were about $300,000 at that time, according to Barnes' financial statements - have not.

The Barnes' costs will only rise with the appointment of a special master. According to the court order, Welsh will be paid $300 an hour, and his fees and other costs are to be split 50-50 between the parties.
--Patricia Horn

permanent link  roberta 4:16 PM
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Gazing at the heavens, eschewing some stars

 

Very nice Hilarie M. Sheets feature about Russell Crotty in yesterday's NY Times. Crotty studies the stars from an aerie above Malibu and makes magical drawings about the night sky with the cheapest student-grade implement -- the bic ballpoint pen.

An amateur astronomer and before that a boyhood surfer (total California dude), Crotty, 47, was included in the great Drawing Now exhibit at MOMA in 2002 and in the (also great) Arcadia (then Beaver College) University "The Sea and the Sky" in 2000. Crotty names Vija Celmins as an influence.

The article says the artist will show new books in New York at CRG Gallery in February. Crotty showed a book at Arcadia and at MOMA. The books, like "Five Nocturnes" (pictured above is a detail of one page) are huge. "Nocturnes," shown in "Drawing Now" measured five ft. by almost ten ft. when opened.

The impulse to create books based on observations of the night sky seems somehow Victorian -- as do the books themselves, which have a Cabinet of Curiosities impact when you see them.

The stars Crotty eschews, by the way, are Cher and others whose houses are below him in the Malibu hills. He could spy...but why?

permanent link  roberta 8:23 AM
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Sunday, May 02, 2004

Big crowd for the Big No

 


Glorious weather it was on Friday, and the gang showed up early for the 5 p.m. curator's walk-through of the Big Nothing at ICA. Trouble was, as Director Claudia Gould said at 5:15 to the waiting hundred or so in the lobby, "Nothing was bigger than we expected."


(All the wordplay around nothing has got to be considered one of the festival's highpoints. They should run a contest for best pun.)

As it turns out the lobby wasn't a bad place to mill around because nothing was everywhere, from Richard Artschwager's small black lozenge pasted on a window (not shown) to Doris Salcedo's video documentation of 126 chairs falling slowly down the side of a building, a political piece commemorating death in a repressive regime. (image top)

Up on the ceiling in the mezzanine was a group a white balloons in the shape of thought bubbles -- a nice 3-D cartoon representing cocktail party chatter. (The mezzanine is where the beer and pretzels are served at ICA openings.)


My friends Bay, Sunya, Margo and I followed everybody in to the gallery once they opened the doors. Curator Ingrid Schaffner and a couple commentators talked about several of the works but ICA's acoustics are less than great and -- hand-held microphones notwithstanding -- I heard less than nothing but not a lot. I did learn that the earliest nothing in the show is by James Lee Byars (not shown) who was influenced by Taoism and by spending time in Japan. Whether that makes Japan the Olduvai Gorge of nothingness is not clear.

Allan McCollum and Matt Mullican whose recent collaboration "Your Fate" I told you about in a previous post are represented here in works that are playful and creepy. Mullican's two melted telephones (one is shown left) are macabre and drew people over like magnets.

The burned skin-like surfaces remind me of specimens you see in glass vitrines at the Mutter Museum.

McCollum's "Glossies," on the other hand, is a stealth piece. (image right) People looked at the pile of what appears to be overexposed snapshots in a vitrine (image) and kept on walking. Of course that's not what they are. "Ink and watercolor on paper with self-adhesive plastic laminate" says the label which makes "Glossies" very much in keeping with McCollum's black paintings in pastel frames which are not paintings at all but plaster objects.

Scanning the room, I saw nothing much to suit just about anyone. Two freestanding works, Katarina Fritsch's "Knot" and Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Box seemed to represent the two ends of the nothing spectrum. Knot is positively nothing and Infinity is negatively nothing.

"Knot," (image) cartoony and dark, was a piece you wanted to touch. Like Mullican's piece it has sensual, skin-like properties.

But whereas I saw no one trying to touch Mullican's melted phones, I saw Director Gould chase off a couple of folks trying to cop a feel of "Knot." The beautifully crafted work (Curator Schaffner told me it was made of plaster with a steel armature and the surface was painted black, although later I ran into ICA's outgoing PR guy John McInerney who said the surface was graphite, so I'm a little confused.)



At any rate, installing the work involved a crane-like machine to lift the heavy load off its pallette and position it on the floor. Somewhere during the install, "Knot," which is on loan from the PMA which owns it, received a ding which necessitated numerous trips between the PMA's conservation lab and ICA to cook up just the right matte black for the fix.



That matte, black, by the way, is a wow. Coupled with the intertwined strands of rats tails which evoke hair and yarn and make you gag when you think rats, the piece is powerful visualization of the void.



Kusama's piece (left and right are details) is sly and private. It stands in the middle of the space and looks like a large, mirrored telephone booth reflecting everything in the neighborhood. There's a small rectangular aperture for viewing what's inside -- a strobe-light show of one of Kusama's trademark infinity spaces. People were lined up for a view. It felt like waiting to use the telescope to look at Mt. Rushmore. Call it the national monument to nothingness.

It was a hard piece to photograph if you didn't know what you were doing but infinitely satisfying to experience in person. Where Fritsch's piece is all darkness and forboding Kusama's is lyrical and calming.



Local artists Eileen Neff and Paul Swenbeck and Tom Chimes are great additions to the show which, if not infinitely big, is finitely big -- sixty artists, two floors of work -- and no benches for the weary.

Swenbeck's faux vines snake around the galleries like something you might like to keep your eye on lest it grab you. Curator Schaffner called them a garden that haunts the big nothing. (image left)

Neff's digitally-worked photograph of a white cloud and a pine tree kissing in a garden is whimsical and a little wild. (image right above)

Ramped up


Judy Pfaff's ramp installation is an architectural intervention with textural wall drawings. I'm not a fan of the ramp space as a venue for art but I think this piece works. Not only does it work with the windows, the handicap railing, and the utilititarian nature of the space but it's about architectural space which is a good move for what is a problematic architectural space. (image right)

Metal bars create structure and anti-structure playing off the ramp and the windows. Colored tape on the walls everywhere masks off grids and creates an urban feel. One line of green string running up the ramp wall spoke to me of mural painters using a "snap" line to demarcate vanishing points and create fictional "real" space through perspective.

The colors are mosly muted and the piece -- all organized but a little chaotic -- seemed a great transitional work between what's downstairs and what's up.

"When Claudia told me about the space I said 'Please don't do that to me'," Pfaff told the crowd with a laugh. She said she changed the piece radically only ten days ago. It was going to be abstract but then it got imagery (Japanese tea house, Italian Rennaissance building).

"I keep thinking I'm Asian although nobody else thinks that," Pfaff confessed.

Winds of War upstairs

Yun-Fei Ji's drawings and paintings in the Project Space at the top of the ramp are elegant storytelling mixing traditional scroll and ink techniques with a sensibility atune to German expressionism (echoes of George Grosz) and today's cartooning. (image is detail from "Dinner at the Forbidden City," 2001)

Slow and fast at the same time, you read the work for its details which are plentiful and subtle. Ji, who spoke at the opening, referred to the ancient tradition of Chinese story-telling paintings in which trees represent the highly educated man of letters and the wind always represents the emperor. Artists sometimes could be critical of the emperor in these works, but they did so in an oblique way in order to allow the emperor to receive the message while at the same time saving face.

All that changed during the Maoist regime which had a tradition of its own -- revising history by purging people from images in photographs and paintings as they became persona non grata.

Ji's work, which seems both oblique and story-telling (one scroll is of the Boxer Rebellion; there's a Nixon in China drawing) is a great paradigm for narrative art.

Nothing much else upstairs


It's all dark upstairs with numerous video and slide pieces requiring the void to make them look their best. I didn't didn't look long but offer this as the snappiest piece,(image right) a text messaging work in which streams of words flashed on the screen then disappeared. Whether or not there was meaning in the words was unclear -- and irrelevant. The piece was like a brain on speed -- jumpy and all over the place. Which is kind of like our electronics-driven culture. (I'm in the dark on whose work it is, sorry.)
permanent link  roberta 9:01 AM
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